BRUSSELS: DR Congo President Felix Tshisekedi appealed to his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame to stop supporting insurgents in the DRC at a Brussels event attended by both leaders on Thursday, drawing a rebuke from Kigali that he was “completely mistaken” about the roots of the conflict.
Tshisekedi, 62, issued the call as he took the podium after Kagame at the Global Gateway Forum, an investment conference organized by the EU in the Belgian capital.
“I call this forum as witness, and through it the entire world, to reach out my hand to you, Mr. President, so that we may make peace,” Tshisekedi said.
“This requires you to order the M23 troops supported by your country to stop this escalation, which has already caused enough deaths,” he said.
Kagame had not addressed the conflict directly in his speech, though he referred to an earlier statement by South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, who said he could “feel the energy for making peace” upon seeing the Rwandan and Congolese leaders.
“Some of us also felt the same. We felt the positive energy about business, investment, peace,” Kagame said.
Rwandan Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe later responded directly to the Congolese president on X, saying: “You are completely mistaken. The only one who can stop this escalation is President Tshisekedi, and he alone.” Tshisekedi must end “this ridiculous political comedy that consists of abusing the platform of an important economic partnership summit, like the Global Gateway Forum, to launch accusations and shameless lies against a head of state, before posing as a victim of a conflict that he himself provoked,” said Nduhungirehe.
The eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a region bordering Rwanda with abundant natural resources but plagued by non-state armed groups, has suffered extreme violence for more than three decades.
The M23 armed group, which resumed fighting at the end of 2021, has seized swaths of land in the region with Rwanda’s backing, triggering a spiralling humanitarian crisis.
According to the UN, clashes since January have caused thousands of deaths and forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes. The Congolese government and the M23 signed a declaration of principles on July 19 that included a “permanent ceasefire” to halt the conflict.
It followed a separate US-brokered peace deal between the Congolese and Rwandan governments signed in Washington in June, but it has proved slow to take effect on the ground.
“Africa needs to move on, President Paul Kagame, and we are capable of doing so,” Tshisekedi said, adding he would shelve a call for international sanctions on Rwanda to give talks a chance.
But Rwanda’s foreign minister accused his government of widespread abuses in eastern DRC, including “daily bombings by his fighter jets and attack drones.”
Rwanda has long accused Kinshasa of supporting a militia, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, drawn from the remnants of Hutu fighters who carried out the 1994 Rwandan genocide.